Nuveen

Nuveen is the investment manager of TIAA, bringing a legacy of service to our responsibility of managing $1,020 billion in assets as of 30, June 2019.

As institutional investors ourselves, we understand and address the same challenges as our clients. We recognize the need for better current income and capital appreciation from diversified sources, and the desire to invest in a responsible and sustainable manner. To address these challenges, we have built successful, long-term, durable solutions for over 100 years. By investing alongside our clients and taking on meaningful exposures that further align our interests with theirs; we improve our ability to provide excellent governance for our shared investments.

Nuveen and TIAA’s shared legacy of service allows us to see the world like many of our clients — we are asset owners as well as asset managers. From raising finance to help build America’s infrastructure, to developing retirement plans to ensure teachers retire with dignity, and uniting in 2014, we remain focused on helping clients solve their challenges and reach their financial and societal goals.

These capabilities are delivered through a solutions lens, creating outcome-focused portfolios that solve for return, risk and income. As like-minded partners we bring our institutional capabilities to clients around the world to help them address their challenges and achieve their goals.

As responsible investing (RI) moves into the mainstream, investors are increasingly looking for strategies that go beyond traditional environmental, social and governance (ESG) principles to produce measurable benefits for people and the planet. In response, many RI programs are now expanding to embrace what are known as “impact investing” strategies.

Institutional investors searching for yield and current income opportunities have increased their allocations to non-investment grade corporate bonds and loans. The case for investing in these assets is clear with the 10-year Treasury under 3% and historically low rates across the yield curve. Non-investment grade U.S. corporate debt has historically produced yields in the 6-10% range or greater.

Over the past six weeks, the Fed has relaunched virtually all of its emergency liquidity programs used during the global financial crisis and started several more, all in the name of keeping the financial system functioning and helping the U.S. economy recover once the global economic shutdown is over. It used its April meeting as a status update for how its efforts have worked thus far.

The ongoing crisis has thrown investors’ plans into turmoil. Long-term portfolio return expectations have changed and investors may need to think beyond traditional asset classes to generate the income they need. Hear from Nuveen’s Global Investment Committee on where they are finding opportunities and how best to position portfolios during, and after, the crisis.

At the end of 2019, we titled our year-ahead outlook, “20/20 vision: a clearer path for growth.” That was then. Markets have since been thrown into turmoil, and investors are grappling with positioning their portfolios to minimize the damage from the coronavirus-induced crisis and take advantage of an eventual recovery.

We launched our original set of 2020 predictions a few months ago with the theme, “Uncertainties diminish, but markets struggle.” The coronavirus pandemic and resulting economic and market upheaval have since changed everything. In early March, consensus expectations for 2020 global GDP growth were +3%. Now they are -3%.1 A 6% swing would be unusual over a three-year time period. We just saw one in a month.

Latest from IPE & Real Assets

A consensus on the direction of 10-year US Treasury rates is not obvious, because the answer reverts to a further question: whose consensus? Strategists, economists and other informed professionals have a particular view. The market itself, however, expresses a more diffuse and different opinion.